Interpreting President Barack Obama's Facial Displays of Emotion: Revisiting the Dartmouth Group

Charismatic presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama have been able to overcome stereotype‐based barriers to political power by connecting emotionally with viewers, particularly through their nonverbal skills. In this study we focus on the facial displays of emotion by President Obama and how participants interpret them. This study builds upon the pioneering research of the Dartmouth Group concerning response to displays of happiness‐reassurance by political leaders. It will first replicate and extend upon existing research by using Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to characterize facial displays by President Obama, specifically three neutral displays and three different types of smiles. Second, this study replicates research carried out over two decades ago concerning individual differences in sex, ethnicity, and age cohort on response to political candidates culturally defined as Black. Video focusing on the head and torso were FACS coded and presented in a web‐based experiment to 79 participants working at a southern institution of higher education. The participants identified the emotions felt by President Obama on a scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely” focusing on the basic emotion terms of: “Happy” and “Playful” (happiness‐reassurance) and “Angry” and “Disgusted” (anger‐threat). Findings suggest participants differentiate between subtle facial‐display differences and that there are differences based upon ethnicity and support for President Obama when they interpret his facial displays of emotion.     

Perceptual Justification and Warrant by Default

As I use the term, ‘entitlement’ is any warrant one has by default—i.e. without acquiring it. Some philosophers not only affirm the existence of entitlement, but also give it a crucial role in the justification of our perceptual beliefs. These philosophers affirm the Entitlement Thesis: that an essential part of what makes our perceptual beliefs justified is our entitlement to the proposition that I am not a brain-in-a-vat. Crispin Wright, Stewart Cohen and Roger White are among those who endorse this controversial claim. In this paper, I argue that the Entitlement Thesis is false.     

‘We don't do God’: A critical retrospective of New Labour's approaches to ‘religion or belief’ and ‘faith’

Given that Tony Blair was once infamously told by an aide that in Britain ‘we don't do God’, the New Labour Government that he led was responsible for developing and implementing a series of policies that brought religion firmly into British political spaces. Adopting two policy approaches, these approaches focused on ‘religion or belief’ and ‘faith’. Alongside the incorporation of ‘religion and belief’ into the broadening equalities framework, New Labour encouraged greater engagement with faith communities initially through urban regeneration before implementing a more faith-specific programme, namely the interfaith framework. Drawing on three research projects, this article retrospectively considers the extent to which these approaches were joined up and whether – and indeed how – they contributed to New Labour's overarching measurements of success: creating a more equal society.     

Negotiating faith on the Coventry Road: British-Muslim youth identities in the ‘third space’

This article, which arises from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, explores the negotiation of faith, place and social identity amongst British-Muslim youth in one inner-city community in Birmingham, UK. Narratives drawn from fieldwork are brought into a critical dialogue with theoretical discourse about the nature of culture, the built urban environment, youth identities and contextualised religious discourse within the British-Muslim community. The article suggests that a dynamic definition of culture as an open and ongoing process of meaning-making and the utilisation of ‘third space’ thinking are needed to adequately explore the multifaceted contextual religious discourse of British-Muslim youth. The article seeks to answer a key question: how do urban British-Muslim youth negotiate faith and meaning in a society that increasingly questions their presence and what might their experience have to teach wider society about the impact that contemporary urbanism has on the articulation of personal, political and religious identity?     

Re-conceptualising the religious habitus: Reflexivity and embodied subjectivity in global modernity

The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional conceptions of the religious habitus vulnerable to such criticism, we utilise the writings of Latour in developing a new understanding of the term. Re-conceptualising the religious habitus as something reflexively re-made or instaured, through the cultivation of a subjectivity that locates human action, feeling and thought at the embodied intersection of worldly and other-worldly realities, we illustrate the value of this approach with reference to contemporary Pentecostalism and Islam.     

Concurrent and Longitudinal Relationships Between Development in Graphic,Language and Symbolic Play Domains from the Fourth to the Fifth Year

This research investigated the developing inter‐relationships between language, graphic symbolism and symbolic play both concurrently and longitudinally from the fourth to the fifth year of childhood. Sixty children (n = 60) aged between 3 and 4 years completed multiple assessments of language and assessments of graphic symbolism, symbolic play and non‐verbal intelligence. A year later, 31 children (n = 31) were re‐tested using the same assessments. The findings revealed that skills within each symbolic domain were inter‐related during the fourth year, appearing to develop in a domain‐general type fashion based upon a common underlying symbolic mechanism. However, between the fourth and the fifth years, only language had predictive validity, suggesting a shift towards the verbal mediation of symbolic play and graphic symbolism as language becomes progressively internalized (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Traumatic Attachments and Self-Harm Behaviors

Abstract

Work and the structure it affords is one of the most important vehicles for the expression of worth in our society. With so much invested in the external world of position and achievement, threats to job security pose fundamental challenges to individual identity. Recent upheavals in the workplacedownsizings, early retirements, and corporate reorganizationshave shaken the psychological equilibrium of many of our clients, giving rise to feelings of despair and hopelessness. When disruptive and unwanted changes occur later in life, they become additionally tinged with latent concerns about aging and finding meaning as a mature adult.